The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 Book

This is a book about the making of Europe and not about the development of Europe the focus is on how common practises, cultures and structures spread across the geographic concept of Europe through conquest, colonisation and emulation. For Bartlett the creation of Europe as an actual place with common cultural elements, as opposed to a geographical concept was the result of processes in history starting from around 950. These are essentially colonial and in various ways are the prototypical colonial practices which at the end of the medieval period would be exported to other parts of the world. Bartlett tells us that between 950ish and 1350ish one the same first names spread across Europe, the same saints' cults and religious practices, similar legal and political institutions, stories - why are Charlemagne and the paladins of France and King Arthur and his knights common European property. Who one might ask is guilty for all this? Inevitability it is the busy people between the Rhine and the Seine busily bettering themselves and stirring their neighbours out of happy laziness through hard and soft processes. Hard in the sense of they came, they built castles, they played chess with our lives, soft in the sense of everybody wanting to keep up with, well not the Joneses precisely. Bartlett takes us through colonisation of England, Wales, into Scotland and Ireland, in to Spain, the eastern Mediterranean and the Baltic states as hard processes - build castles, found cities, establish new legal practises. Into eastern Europe and Scandinavia as softer processes of emulation the careful tending by secular powers of a common European tool-kit of feudalism, Church power and law to enhance their power - this might include colonialism in the form of importing settlers from Germany into eastern Europe or the low countries into Wales for economic development - draining marshlands, founding towns with uniform legal codes and common weights and measures, developing mines. In the process a lot of diversity was lost, legal discrimination established, and some very bad cultural habits deeply embedded.

This is really a view and an interpretation of the development of Europe as a more or less cultural unified area and why its boundaries lie where they do. It is not a history that will take one through the German Emperors and the Investiture crisis and the black death, it is about the deeper currents rather than the frothy crests of events.